couple of minutes – Pertinent Observations

Redundancy in movies

I’m writing this while watching this Hindi movie called Cocktail, which is being shown on the pay-per-view Showcase channel on Tata Sky. Ten minutes after the movie started, I remembered this review of the movie that I’d read back when I was released, and thanks to that lost most interest in the movie. However, I continue watching, giving company to the wife, and reading papers and writing, as I watch.

The last Hindi movie I watched with any degree of seriousness was Gangs of Wasseypur (1 and 2), which is an absolutely mindblowing movie. While watching that movie, I remember that time moved insanely slowly. After what I thought was an hour of the movie, I looked at my watch only to realize that only half an hour had passed. Each part of the movie (which actually lasts about two and half hours each) felt like it individually lasted five hours! There was so much action that was packed into the movie.

So coming to the point of the post – the problem with most Hindi movies (not of the GoW variety) is that there is heavy redundancy packed into the movie. Each concept that ties into the main plot of the movie is explained so many times, most times not even through different means, that it is quite easy to miss a part of the movie and still be clued in to the overall plot. Not so with the GoW type, where there is absolutely no redundancy built in, because of which you can’t afford to miss even a couple of minutes of the movie, without losing part of the overall plot.

If you were to read Benoit Mandelbrot’s excellent book on the financial markets (The (mis)behaviour of markets), you would be introduced to this awesome concept of “trading time”. In the book, Mandelbrot explains that markets are not uniform – there are times when there is much more action packed into the markets (like the first and last fifteen minutes of trading every day) than in slower times (mostly around mid-day). Thus, to get a better analysis of the market, Mandelbrot explains, you need to look at it not from the point of view of “clock time” but from the point of view of “trading time”, which “measures time” by way of volume of trade.

Drawing an analogy, a movie like Gangs of Wasseypur is like a snapshot of the financial market during the opening 15 minutes of trading. At every moment in the movie, there is so much happening. Scenes are short, and cut abruptly, and say only what absolutely needs to be said. So you get much more “action” for each minute you spend watching the movie.

(Ok I realize that by repeating the funda in the previous paragraph, this post tends more towards Cocktail than GoW.) Maybe that’s why I don’t particularly enjoy most movies that I watch – there is so much redundancy I get bored. Problem with most mango people is that it takes too much mindspace to be focused through the duration of the movie, so they end up losing parts of the plot in movies such as GoW, and so movies such as these are not as commercially successful as slower paced movies.

Upendra’s Super is a funny movie, in terms of the pace at which it moves. The first two hours are full of theatrics, and unnecessary redundancy that makes you ask why you are watching the movie at all. The last half an hour, both in terms of content and the concept it gets across (property rights, concept of ownership, etc.) packs in so much that you leave the hall feeling satisfied. Maybe the two parts of the movie are aimed at different segments and Uppi seems to have cracked the formula!

Red wine and mirchi

is such an awesome combo. As we just discovered, here in Monastiraki square in Athens. It was this restaurant called Savas. Specializing in one “Sauvlaki”.

So over the last week or so of vacation, the girlfriend has been complaining of not eating spicy enough food. So as we settle down today, and get our can of wine (yeah, you get half a litre of wine in an aluminium can here. Awesome it is), I see this “spicy hot peppers” on the menu.

And given that the girlfriend has been deprived of spicy food, and I like peppers it doesn’t take long for me to order it. And boy was it hot.

I gave up after a couple of bites of the pepper. No amounts of pita bread and Tzatziki (the Greek version of raita – with cucumber and garlic blended into curd) could cure the hotness on my tongue. With there being no water on the table, I went straight for the wine.

I’ve always suspected it when the girlfriend has claimed to have Gult roots. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of Gult being spoken in her family, and had half my pre-wedding dance party inundated with Gult songs, but still find it hard to accept she’s Gult. And did she prove it! She ate four whole peppers, as I struggled to finish half..

A couple of minutes back, we staggered back to the hotel. Absolutely drunk. We’d had 250 ml of red wine each, “house wine” according to the restaurant. And mirchi. Whatta combo. Surprised the “shady bars” of Bangalore haven’t exploited it yet. Maybe no one drinks wine there.

The Non-Deliverable Email

This morning I happened to annoy my would-be-missus so much that she sent me a stinker of an email threatening me with dire consequences. However, unfortunately (?!) she had used the word “shit” and had sent it from her corporate mailbox to my corporate account, so the email never reached me.

She spent a few minutes of the next few hours wondering why I hadn’t reacted to the stinker of her email, and then decided to concentrate on her work instead, and cooled down in the process. I, completely unaware of the email and the dire consequences it threatened (the mail never reached me), too took a while to cool down, then decided to concentrate on work, and proceeded to attend a series of random presentations.

So when we talked in the evening, all was cool and peaceful with the world. We spent a couple of minutes talking about the non-delivered email, and the events leading up to it, and proceeded to talk about more important things in the world.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I hereby present to you the non-deliverable email. The exact technology I haven’t figured out (and who knows, it might have already been invented, given my luck with these kind of insights) but this is something more foolproof than a corporate email profanity-blocker. This is basically designed for email that you would send in the heat of the moment and then regret later on in life. It is designed to make you think thrice (not by making you solve simple arithmetic, like Google announced with their drunk email policy) before hitting the send button. It is designed to go into some suspense account somewhere in the world, and never reappear.

I think a large portion of (personal) emails that are sent are later regretted by the senders. Ok not a very large proportion but significant enough to make my product a success. So the option of non-deliverable email means whatever you yell out in the heat of the moment (no pun intended) is never heard!

There are two loopholes with this, of course:

1. When you are angry and want to yell at someone by email, you are surely not in the right frame of mind to mark the email as “non-deliverable”. A different mechanism might need to be put in place to make you more discrete
2. Sometimes when I’m angry and send out angry emails, I expect a quick response, else I get angrier. Non-deliverable email would prove counterproductive for people like me. However, I think in the medium to long run it is useful.

However, if this technology comes into place, it would make sense to extend it to text messages also. The immediate reason for the would-be-missus’s annoyance this morning was a series of fitful text messages that I sent her, that I’ve been deeply regretting ever since. If only I had marked those text messages as non-deliverable..

Blegs and cribs

Given that my pipeline in the arranged scissors project is temporarily empty, I think I should concentrate on other issues. Other real and pressing issues. Speaking of pressing issues, I need to call the dhobi and give my shirts for ironing. I have excellent ironing infrastructure in my house but I think that 2 rupees a shirt is cheaper than 10 minutes a shirt.

My big problem in life currently (and no, it isn’t pressing) is that I’m under a credit crunch. My credit card expired last month and ICICI didn’t send a replacement. Total jai. Six months back, HDFC Bank happened to offer me a “gold card”. I happily told said “i want i want”. They came over and got a few forms filled. Some guy landed up at home to do address verification, found it locked and called me. I was at work and abused him back for arriving at the middle of a weekday without prior intimation. I received a letter from HDFC a few weeks later saying that they found me not creditworthy.

I had gotten my first credit card (the ICICI thing) back when I was a student at IIMB. My father had abused me for it, saying it will trigger bad spending habits. I am happy to note that I did none of it, and have always lived well within my means. It is not the credit that I want. It is the convenience of online transactions. And now it seems I can’t do any of it. Total jai is happening.

The other concern I have is that my passport will be expiring this May. Given that it’s less than six months away, I can’t leave the country now. And I have no clue how to go about renewing it. Anyone who has fundaes about this please let me know. It might help to add here that I have one live visa (a B1/B2 to the US) on it.

The biggest problem that I think is facing me is that I’m facing an overdose of thought. I’m thinking too much. I’m thinking too much for every damn small thing. Driving back from Akshardham last evening, I pulled over several times to refer to the map and chart out my route, only to think a couple of minutes later that I’ve lost my way and repeat the process. And at each step, I’d solve using Dijkstra’s algorithm. Clearly suboptimal. Memoriless systems should not use algorithms that require things to be stored in memory.

Liverpool is playing ManCity as I write this. Normally I don’t not watch a Liverpool game if I can help it, but I found this one too emotionally taxing and switched channels. I was thinking of my funda about how different EPL teams are like different civilizations in Age of Empires, and have relative strengths and weaknesses. Apart from these, each team has a special weapon. For example, when you play Stoke, you need to rejig your defence completely so as to not put the ball out of play in your own half, thanks to their special weapon – the longthrowman Rory Delap. Liverpool’s special weapon could probably Alonso’s long shots though they don’t use it that much. Man U has C Ronaldo. And so forth. Ok I should stop straining my brain further by thinking about this.

I’ve taken tomorrow off. Shivarathri is a trading holiday and thus an optional off for us. I was supposed to do a moviethon with Aadisht but he decided he’s going to wrok so I suppose I’ll chill at home and try chill my nerves. How I’ll manage to do that I don’t know.